Decency now, progress later
“That empathy, that decency, the belief that everybody counts — that’s who Joe is. When he talks with someone who’s lost her job, Joe remembers the night his father sat him down to say that he’d lost his. When Joe listens to a parent who’s trying to hold it all together right now, he does it as the single dad who took the train back to Wilmington each and every night so he could tuck his kids into bed.”
Obama has no doubts that Americans have grown contemptuous of government and public service. Indeed he understands that even for those who to date hold some faith in the public good, there is a desire to see massive and encompassing structural change.
Biden is a safe choice in that for those who have given up, he is able to rekindle a belief in government. For those who would prefer to see radical change, Biden is presented by Obama as a man more amenable to progress than Trump.